Poll: Half say economy has stabilized

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Slightly more than half of Americans think the sickly U.S. economy has stabilized, and almost three in every four think it will take longer than six months for a massive economic stimulus program to be felt, an Ipsos-McClatchy tracking poll showed Wednesday.

And a separate survey released Wednesday by Ipsos, done for the Royal Bank of Canada, showed the first significant boost in consumer confidence since September, when the global financial crisis erupted.

Results from both polls are sure to be welcome news to President Barack Obama and his Treasury Department, which has spent the past two months working round-the-clock in an effort to reverse the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The Ipsos/McClatchy tracking poll found that 52 percent of Americans now think the U.S. economy has stabilized. That’s well up from the 35 percent who felt that just four weeks earlier.

Only one in three Americans thought the worst of the economic crisis is still to come, compared with 57 percent last month.

And in another bit of good news, 72 percent of poll respondents expected the $787 billion economic stimulus package to show results in a period beyond six months. It suggests that the Obama administration’s plea for patience seems to have created expectations for a recovery over a longer horizon.

That’s not to say that there aren’t risks ahead, not the least of which is that credit markets remain tight and lending restrained. The Treasury Department by month’s end will have completed stress tests on the country’s 19 largest banks, and the results could lead to new concern about the banking sector.

And in the coming weeks, the Obama administration will implement its program to co-invest in the so-called toxic assets. If that doesn’t go well, it could lead to more uncertainty.